Spotlight: White Mountaineering

Chances are, unless you’ve been to Japan in the last few years, you haven’t heard of White Mountaineering. It might come as a shock then, as it was to me when I recently saw the collection in New York for the first time, that it is essentially a super brand – like the saying goes, it’s “huge in Japan.” It all began in 2006 when designer Yosuke Aizawa, a veteran of Comme des Garcons, launched the brand under a simple concept: to blend the outdoors with the urban by focusing on design, function and technology. With a new women’s line launched last year, they’re moving stateside and are already sold in the likes of Bergdorf Goodman and Odin.